TYPE2 | type design

Goody goody, well.. some schoolwork again. A bit of avantgarde in type design — an alphabet called TYPE². Autumn coming… have some jocose delight!

You can checkout the TYPE² GALLERY!

The aim was to create an alphabet made of particular items or elements. I was thinking of many different objects, but suddenly I got the idea of making letters of another letters. At that time I heaven’t realized how big this job is going to be. It seemed easy-but-pretty, but then it turned out as a really time-wasting process (there are 26 letters!).

First task was to choose the right typeface, something geometrical, but ellegant at the same time, so after couple of blank shots I decided to choose Swiss 721 BT in a bold variant (of course the capital letters). The design of the individual letters allowed me to build some amazing structures and not to get any boring repeating themes.

What I did not want to create was some kind of a texture or a pattern, so the first impression would let you know, that this alphabet was created by a human being and not a computer or a letteristic algorithm. I must have been really careful of not repeating the same ideas, but after designing the letter A, I realised that there have to be some rules after all.

First rule — There had to be only few sizes of each filling letter for one shape, if it had not, the chaos would overrule and the letters wouldn’t share the same concept. Therefore, for each letter you can made 3 to 5 different sizes and start filling the basic shape.

Second rule — There are only two things you can do with the letters: sizing them and rotating them in 90°. I was thinking of mirroring, but it would decrease the readability.

Third rule — The letters must not touch each other. It would be agianst either the readability or recognising the letters themselves.

Basically, we can divide the letters to three different groups: round (O, C, S, Q, U), linear (I, F, L, M, V, …) and combined (G, B, P, R, …). I started with the linear ones since this was the easier part (except for T and M). Whenever I started with designing, I made one or two dominant letters and then started filling the remaining space. Hard times came with designing the round ones, I had nothing to catch the shape with the border, but eventually I found a way to do it just by sight. The merely impossible part was the way to get some of the combined letters like B, Q or R. It spend days to get those puzzles together and still keep the initial idea.

After I finished rough designing I had to refine certain letters to preserve the same colour of the typeface (meaning the uniform diffusion of the shapes so they have the same grey depth). It was my first typeface design so the result is not that precise, some of the letters are more “darker”, some are “lighter”, althought I made enough for this purpose (just schoolwork).

Usage

The letter can be used as an initial more than in a logotype, because of the complex structure and imbalance in grey depth between some of them.

Well, how do you like it? if you are interested in using them, let me know, and I’ll send you the sources in curves.

Letters in big

Here are some of the letters for detailed research. If you are still interested, you can visit the TYPE² GALLERY!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 2:20 am and is filed under visual. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can save this page to your del.icio.us bookmarks!